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Category Archives: PRA

The government needs to give up on the idea of parity between paper forms and electronic forms. This one concept alone is holding back Digital Services and public-centric offerings more than any other.

As I mentioned in my last post, The Government Paperwork Elimination Act (GPEA) of 1998 tried to establish electronic interactions as equivalent to paper. In 1998, this might have been forward-leaning, but in 2015 it just doesn’t go far enough. Because much of government policy has been based around paper forms, it requires a creative leap of the imagination to treat electronic forms and online interactions as something different and better. But the two channels have a major difference: electronic forms can be interactive, while paper forms can never be. Interactivity requires different ways of thinking. Instead, much of our government process, including the implementation of the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA), effectively forces us to dispense with any interactivity, for the specious reason that it would make electronic interaction different from paper.

Let me give a few illustrations of how channel parity holds us back from what is considered normal customer service. Online forms generally validate user input as it is entered – they check for mistakes that would result in denied applications and database integrity issues. But validation is something that paper cannot do – the public can submit paper applications that have silly errors in them. So “parity thinking” requires that we allow them to make the same mistakes electronically. In fact, we could often go further than simple validation – if the user is applying for something that they are patently unqualified for, our online form could in some cases let them know immediately and save them the trouble and cost of applying. But paper applications do not do this, so it is disallowed or frowned upon.

There are cases where we could help the applicant fill out an application by providing data that we already know or can look up for them. For example, if they are applying to replace a green card, we could look up the information from their previous card, ask what has changed, ask for proof of those changes, and produce the card. Instead, we have them enter from scratch much of the information on the card, as they would on paper, then check to see if it matches what we already know.

I understand that there are legal and policy issues involved here. I’m just suggesting that those reflect an old way of thinking that no longer aligns with a world that has changed. We should be looking for ways to change those laws and policies. Perhaps a “Government Interactivity Preference Act”?